The Bitter End
by we've been had
Summary: Daniel needed to see Subject 16's death for himself.


The fact that Daniel was even in Rome was completely coincidental to the death of Subject Sixteen. He keeps an ear to the channels that no one thinks he cares about. He may not be a whiz at everything, no. What he is is not a complete idiot. Competent enough that no one's found his backdoors into these channels. Has keywords flagged to keep him in the loop. Case in point: "stopping by". To catch up with Warren, he'd told security. Not that they would have stopped Daniel, of course, not really.

Showing up out of the blue was enough to scare the six people outside the door of the center of the Animus Project. He was supposed to be on mission somewhere else, not here. Lucy Stillman is among them. She's pale. She looks sick, really.

Probably the first to stumble in on the sight of the suicide after _hiding_ all of Subject Sixteens escapades Daniel would later find out. She'd seen something horrible. Something that will haunt her dreams for the rest of her life.

Good. He has no capacity to feel sorry for her and he never will. Misplaced anger? Maybe.

Yet, he had to turn away from her. From her face. From her body language. Her shaking and the obvious signs of feeling so much of everything that it hurt. Not that she completely met his eyes anyways. She was guilty and she knew it. She'd blame herself and Daniel would take sadomasochistic _joy_ out of it. One half a deeply painful, personal guilt for being so incredibly angry at someone who wasn't entirely a bad person that'd been manipulated. Seventeen was too young to be sending someone that deep undercover all alone with no outside contact. The other half feeling absolutely justified. _She_ had a choice and if that'd been him in place of her "fellow Assassin", Daniel was pretty sure she would have let him die, too.

Anger has always felt better than sadness. Anger has always won, if by only a little.

Daniel knew _exactly_ what Lucy was feeling, sitting out in the hall while some guy from the crew having to go clean up that awful mess hovered over her. She wanted to cry, or scream, or just run. Run away. Run far away. Not that it'd do any good. She's trapped by her own choices. Same as him. Instead there's a numbness. Daniel would stand by that assumption as fact. The kind people envision when they read about it, when they see it on TV.

He's convinced himself he's always been numb, but the truth is that Daniel Cross was the furthest thing from. He's just a pro at lying.

No one questions him about being there. As far as anyone else past security was concerned he was sent in to supervise or something. "Part of the project", as it were. No one gives him lip as he walks around. Watches the crew put down markers, take photos, act like it's some crime scene instead of what it really was. Daniel makes them nervous more than anything else, really. He can tell. They view him as blazé at the very least, lacking in any sense of humanity at the worst. After all, who the hell smokes while casually strolling around the sight of a gruesome suicide from the very same project that produced you?

Daniel does.

He starts with the left hand side. Let's his cigarette hang as he puts his hands in his pockets for a few minutes to hide the nervous tension in them. Takes in every single smattering of blood. Rust colored, now. Long enough that it's dry. Four, maybe five hours old at minimum while keeping in mind how cold the room was. That's what happens when you decide to loop camera footage. Walks a steady circle and looks. Really _looks_. Looks at all the blood, impressed at the amount of control it took to make sure there was just enough to use but not enough to bleed out right away. By the time Daniel had finished his cigarette he was staring at the wall above the bed.

 _I've entered the Abyss and never returned._

Daniel sees it all for what it is. The seeming word salad, the pyramids, the cryptic visuals. That? Well, that he can't get away from. The words stick to him, even when he tries to distract himself with the observation that most of this must have been done left handed. There's always this handprint, the right one, next to most of it. The words stick with him. He sees it for what it is. Sees it for the truth.

There is no going back once you step in. Ready or not.

Granted, Daniel's hyperfocus had blocked out the shouting that'd kicked up a minute or so ago. Vidic, expressive as always, put a hand on his should and if Daniel hadn't snapped out of it in time, that hand probably would have ended up broken. It was holding onto him tight.

The look Vidic was giving him was worried. "Daniel, you shouldn't be here–"

"I'm fine, Warren. Relax."

No, Daniel wasn't fine. He wanted to break every single one of those fingers.

Vidic opens his mouth.

"I said I'm _fine_."

If Vidic had anything else to say about it Daniel wasn't around for it. He left him in the wake of what this project could have very well done to Daniel if he wasn't so heavily conditioned ( _programmed_ ) to stay alive. Not that he hasn't tried to find ways around it. A whole other thought for another time. No, he was all too aware of Vidic's almost pathological need to make Daniel his one success. The one good thing to come out of all of this. Justification, maybe. Or vindication. Sometimes even Daniel didn't know.

Daniel walked away and took a silent, sadistic glee in knowing Vidic was looking at the carnage and wishing Daniel hadn't come to see it out of guilt and sorrow that made Daniel's skin crawl every time he looked at that man. Serves as a reminder that even monsters aren't monsters one hundred percent of the time. It always surprised even himself when he couldn't actually express that feeling all the same, considering he's never had a problem with being an unrepentant asshole in the first place.

Being here in Rome, when he was supposed to be in Spain at the time? It meant Daniel knew things he "wasn't supposed to". As if that had ever stopped him.

Moving around the clean up crew was surprisingly easy and Daniel filed away the mess around that side of the Animus– directly from that little room's doorway. The body on the machine included. He knows what it all means. Well, maybe not the _exacts_ of it. Daniel doubts he ever would unless the dead could tell tales. The people handling photographing the body probably didn't need any other excuse to take a break than Daniel waving them off. Suicides were bad. Messy ones even worse. Seriously crazy-in-appearance fucked up ones? Daniel stomached it because he's seen worse in comparison.

He doesn't touch the body. Just looks down at it. The person that used to be in that body is gone– and that's how he views it. The dead are dead. Bodies. No one is there anymore. It's the only thing Daniel has in trying to understand death on a personal level, mouth becoming a thin, harsh line and his eyes narrowing just a bit.

He was never so glad that the people around him sure as hell didn't know a lick of Russian. Daniel finds that he can think more clearly when he says it out loud. It makes it real. It was stuff he didn't want anyone else to really understand. A little bit of privacy where there almost wasn't any.

"What were you trying to accomplish?" he asks the corpse, folding his arms. "What did you do all of this for?"

A pause while he reconsidered those words. No, that didn't make sense. This was too personal to be a "what".

" _Who_ did you do all of this for?"

Daniel knows they're messages. These weren't entirely the scrawlings of a deranged man driven to the brink. No, if there was anything Daniel gleaned from all the files, good ol' Subject Sixteen was very keen on being alive. There were other things, too, but _that_ more than anything else. Hard to make the world some better place when you're dead. Problem was? There was no getting out of here alive and everyone knew it. Everyone who dealt with this project, anyways. No, these were attempts at trying to organize some shattered sense of self, trying as best as the guy could to put down whatever he was trying to say in a way that could be parsed together one way or another. Hell, Daniel has _seen it_. He'd seen the shape of time itself and understood it. Understood the beginning and the end. Something he kept to himself after a while. No one listens to a mad man. Daniel was very easily ignored on that front. So he'd stopped trying to get people to listen to his warnings. So what if he didn't get all of what the symbols and the words meant? He didn't think he was supposed to. The only person he could think that it'd be for was one part Lucy and most parts Bill.

Oh, yes. Daniel knew about _that_ little aside, too. The Animus project was absolutely everything to him. Everything to do with it was one of his obsessions. Things he needed to know or he'd go mad(der) trying to pretend it was never ever real. Make himself a player in it instead of just another victim. Take back at least a fabrication of control.

Putting it aside, he found himself tilting his head enough to get a good look at the violence that was in place of arms, of hands, blood crusted to the point it was starting to flake. Tutting softly.

"Nasty business there, Clay." Because he had a _name_ , not just some case file. "Had to have hurt like a son of a bitch. You know, if it wasn't for the fact that you're creepily staring off at nothing and smiling, I'd say you'd have been angry instead of practical. Blood never does wash out."

Not really. Not ever. No amount of chemicals gets rid of it.

He fell silent after that thought. Bit down on it to keep himself from laughing hysterically. Disguises it by walking around to the other side of the Animus while he gathered his thoughts, shaking his head.

"Well, not totally angry, anyways. Not like me."

Truth be told, Daniel was partially making conjecture. He knew about Clay, delved a bit into all the psych notes, all the medical briefs. Skimmed it like some kind of outside observer instead of an exceedingly obsessed lunatic. Still, it was enough, he thinks. Enough to get a basic picture.

"They don't let me use the new system. Probably because I would have cracked in days compared to a whole year. I hear it's considerably more flawed than mine."

God, he probably did look like a complete lunatic to these people.

Daniel didn't care.

The first and only time he had any proof that all of this was physical, _real_ , was closing Clay's eyes. He expected it to be more difficult with an hours' long dead body. It wasn't. Daniel didn't completely lack in sympathy. If anything, it was sitting inside him, hot and hard. Ready to explode into an unprovoked fit of rage. Rage, sadness, self-loathing, jealousy that he was the one making himself the bad guy and being made a martyr for it instead of someone more like Clay. Afraid to die where all Daniel wanted was to just _stop_ ; having the choice to either try or to simply let himself completely lose it, and taking the hard way out. The bloody way out, sure, but this is what sacrifice really is. There was also a small sense of happiness about it, too. It was over for Clay. Whatever mission he'd set out to finish was accomplished. And, yes, a deep sympathy.

The only way Daniel can keep a lid on it is reminding himself that this is the price people pay for siding with the Assassins.

"Rest in peace," Daniel says and it tastes foreign. Words he hasn't spoken, Russian or no, in fifteen years. Surprising himself in how much he actually means it. "Your secret is safe with me."

Just because Daniel was self aware of everything that was fucked up in his life, aware of his own decisions to keep believing in what the Templars stood for, doesn't mean that he didn't want to watch Abstergo burn. Maybe this was the key; maybe it wasn't. Maybe it was just his way of rebelling against something he can't– _won't_ otherwise fight against.

When he finally does leave for the hall and let Vidic pull him into an embrace he actually took some comfort in for once, let's himself be weak and rest his forehead on the man's shoulder, he realizes, not for the first or last time, that he wished things had been different. That he'd been a different person.

Maybe then he would have done the right thing. Hell, maybe that body, that mess, could have been him. Always so many "maybes".

Daniel knows he was never going to be the hero. Never an honest "war hero", not just some label, some fading symbol. That's for someone else.

"Coffee?" Vidic asks after they've stepped apart, his face pulled into a look of such honest concern Daniel wanted to scream.

Lucy was nowhere in sight. Probably for the better. The whole thing rattled even Daniel more than he'd anticipated that it would.

"Yeah," he mutters. Drained. Feeling guilty for feeling drained.

Daniel won't talk about this to the Doc. He tells Dr. Sung almost everything. Not this, though. This was as personal and private as it ever got.

His main comfort (only comfort) is that in the end, everyone dies. One way or another. With him will die every other voice that'd left him a ghost in his own body. A life he'd never been able to live. Not himself.

In the end, "Daniel Cross", the name he wasn't even born with, will be just as much of a ghost and at least a few people would have some good memories of it. More than Daniel had ever thought he'd get.

That bitterness was the only real truth he knew when everything else looked like a lie.

And yet, it still tasted a lot better than the main lobby's shitty coffee.


End file.
